25. WHAT THE KING GAVE BACK LEON
Chapter twenty-five
WHAT THE KING GAVE BACK LEON
LEON
He holds on for three months, and he spends them the way he spent everything else, deliberately, with a plan nobody else can see.
They are not good months. I will not pretend they are.
The man who filled a chapel with his voice can no longer cross a room, and by the end he cannot cross a bed, and there is a stretch in the middle of it where he is angry in the way the dying are angry, at the pillows, at the light, at me, and then ashamed of it afterward, which is worse.
But he uses them. That is the thing I did not understand until it was over.
He teaches me the realm. Not the ceremony, he does not care about the ceremony.
He teaches me which minister lies and which one only exaggerates.
He teaches me that the Chamberlain's loyalty is real but slow, and that slow loyalty must be given tasks with long fuses.
He tells me where the money is, and then where the money actually is.
He makes me sit at his bedside with a ledger while he takes a court apart for me piece by piece, and when I am too tired to follow he says, "Then be tired and follow anyway, I do not have a second pass in me. "
Portia comes and goes, heavy now, moving carefully, and he watches her come and go with a satisfaction he does not bother to hide.
"Bridge-Queen," he says, every single time. It has become a joke between them, and it has also never once been a joke.
Suzanne stays.
That is the other thing. My grandmother does not go home. She takes rooms in the palace she was born in and she comes to his study every afternoon at four, and the two of them sit together for an hour, and I do not know what they talk about because I have never once asked and I never will.
But I know they do not talk about it. I know because I came down the corridor one afternoon and heard them, and they were arguing about a horse. A horse that died in 1968. She was insisting it had been a gray and he was insisting it had been a bay and both of them sounded about nine years old.
I stood in that corridor and I listened to a king and a princess of Poland argue about a dead horse, and I understood that this is how a brother and a sister forgive each other when there are not enough months left for the real conversation.
They pick something small. And they hold onto it.
And they let the small thing carry the weight of the enormous one, because the enormous one would take a year and they do not have a year.
They have three months. And they spend it on a horse.
At the end, he sends for us.
All of us. That is the last piece of the plan, and it is so exactly like him that I laugh, standing in the doorway, and then have to put my hand on the frame.
The room is full. Keith. Katherine. Suzanne and Connor.
Candice, and Barbara, and Kevin, and the twins standing at the back trying to be small.
Portia's father, come from Dragonia by a gate that burns pale now.
Portia herself, one hand under the weight of the child, and the hatchling asleep in a basket at her feet because Ferb specifically asked for it and would not be argued with.
He is very small in the bed now. But his eyes are open, and they are still bright, and they still find the person in the room who needs to be found.
They find Keith.
"Come here," Ferb says.
Keith comes. My father, who is a mountain, who has never bent to anything, crosses that room like a man walking to a sentence.
"I took your son."
"Ferb."
"No. You will let me say it, and you will let me say it in front of all of them, because a thing said in a room is not the same as a thing said in a doorway, and I have made that mistake once already in my life.
" He breathes. It takes him a while. "I took your son.
I told myself the sea took him and I only kept him, and that is a lawyer's sentence, and I have been a lawyer about it for twenty years.
" His hand moves on the coverlet, searching, and Keith takes it.
"You had a boy. He was five. And I stood in a warm room and weighed what it would cost me to give him back, and I decided the cost was too high, and I have never in my life made a colder decision or told myself a warmer story about it. "
Nobody in that room breathes.
"So here." Ferb's grip tightens on Keith's hand, and then he reaches out, blind, with the other, and I understand what he wants and I go to him and I give him my hand and he takes it.
"Here. In front of witnesses. In front of two thrones and my sister and your wife.
" He is looking at Keith, only at Keith.
"He is yours. He was always yours. I am not giving you a crown, the crown is his, I cannot give away what I already handed over.
I am giving you back your son. Take him. "
And he puts my hand into Keith's hand.
That is all. It is such a small gesture. An old man in a bed moving one hand into another, four inches, no more.
Keith makes a sound like something breaking.
"I don't want him back on your terms," he says. His voice is wrecked. "I want him back because he wants to be back. I have spent twenty years being handed things."
"Then ask him," Ferb says. "God, Keith, you have been standing next to him for a year. Ask him."
And Keith turns to me, and my father, the Alpha of New York, the hardest man in any room, who came through a gate into a dragon war because his son was on the other side of it, cannot get the words out.
So I say it for him.
"Yes," I tell him. "The answer's yes. It was yes in the ash outside Dragonia when you put your hand on my neck. You didn't have to ask then either."
Ferb closes his eyes. "Thank God," he says. "That took you both long enough."
Then he turns his head on the pillow, and he looks for his sister.
"Suzanne."
She has been standing at the foot of the bed with her hands folded and her chin up, exactly as she stood at the wedding, exactly as I suspect she has stood at every hard thing in her life.
"Ferdinand," she says.
"I need something from you, and I do not have the standing to ask, so I am going to ask anyway, because I am dying and it is a considerable advantage in a negotiation."
"It always was," Suzanne says.
Something moves at the corner of his mouth.
"He will be alone in an hour," Ferb says.
"That is the plain fact of it, and everyone in this room is being very careful not to say it.
He has a father again, and a wife, and a child coming, and he will still be alone, because he is about to be the only man in this country who cannot ask anyone for help without it becoming policy.
" His eyes hold hers. "I know what that is.
I have been that for sixty years. I would not wish it on a dog and I am about to hand it to a boy I love. "
Suzanne does not move.
"So I am asking my sister, who is a princess of this realm by birth and blood and who has every right to stand in that throne room and be heard," he says, "to stand in it.
Not to rule. He does not need a regent, he needs a wall at his back.
When they come at him, and they will come at him within the month, I want them to look up and see you.
And I want your husband beside you, because Connor has the only honest face any of us has ever met and there is no weapon in politics quite like an honest face. "
Connor makes a small sound at that. Suzanne does not look at him.
"You are asking me to come home," she says.
"I am asking you to come home."
"After thirty years. To the house you did not write to me from."
"Yes."
The silence goes on a very long time.
And then my grandmother crosses the room, and she sits down on the edge of her brother's bed the way she must have sat on it when they were children in this same palace, and she takes his face in both her hands.
"You are an absolute fool, Ferdinand," she says. "You always were. You could have had all of it. Me, and the boy, and thirty years, and all you had to do was write me one line."
"I know."
"One line."
"I know," Ferb says.
"It was a bay," she says.
He laughs. It costs him everything, and he laughs anyway, and it turns into a cough, and she holds his head against her shoulder while it passes the way you would hold a child.
"It was gray," he says, when he can.
"It was a bay, you insufferable man."
And that is how they do it. That is the whole reconciliation, right there, in front of all of us, and there is not one word of forgiveness anywhere in it.
He goes about an hour later.
There is no struggle in it. Only a tide going out that does not mean to come back. My hand is in one of his and Portia's is in the other and Keith's rough palm is on his shoulder and Suzanne has not moved from the edge of the bed and does not move for a long time after.
The last thing he does is look around the room. At the two old kings. At the wolves and the dragons standing shoulder to shoulder along the wall. At his sister. At the sleeping hatchling in its basket, the impossible braided thing that should not exist.
And the corner of his mouth moves.
Sixty years of reading rooms. He has read this one, and it has come out exactly the way he arranged it, and the cunning old monarch is pleased with himself one final time.
"Good," he says.
And then he is gone.
And I am a king, and an orphan twice over, and a man who finally got to say goodbye to one of his fathers, which is more than the sea ever gave me.
Dearest Readers,
They argued about a horse.
Three months. That was all they had left, and a king and a princess of Poland sat together every afternoon at four o'clock and argued about whether a horse that died in 1968 was a gray or a bay, and never once, not one single time, did either of them mention the twenty years.
I want you to understand what that is, loves. That is not avoidance. That is two people who know the real conversation would take a year, and who do not have a year, choosing something small to carry something enormous.
He put his hand into his brother's hand and gave him back his son. He asked his sister to be a wall.
And she called him a fool, and held his head against her shoulder while he coughed, and told him it was a bay.
Tell me honestly, my darlings. Was that forgiveness?
Or is forgiveness sometimes just a horse?
Turn the page. They are taking him to the water.
Your author.